Support from FreeBSD comes from the open source community. The bge(4) driver in HEAD supports the BCM5720 but does not work correctly on the Dell R720 systems due to support for iDRAC on the Dell systems. Driver changes have been submitted for HEAD for the Dell R720 but have not been added to head or back ported to 9.0. Hopefully the changes to HEAD will be available in the next few days.

Dave

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Can the maintainer of this driver comment on the status of the integration of the R720 support for iDRAC?

I'm working on integrating the required change to make BCM5720 with NC-SI firmware work on FreeBSD. It needs more testing and cleanups to not introduce regressions on other controllers. I'll let you know when patch is available to testing.

It is only successful at ping 90% of the time and then the error "network is unreachable" occurs.

Please provide an update and an ETA for the complete driver.

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I realize this is causing problems for you. However, as far as I know, yongari@ is a volunteer (as are most FreeBSD developers) and not a Broadcom or Dell employee. I've found him to be quite responsive to problem reports. Of course, the more information that's provided, the easier it is to track down the underlying problem.

As a user-to-user suggestion, you might want to re-word your message to something like "I'm still having issues with the BCM5720 card. I'm seeing about a 10% packet loss rate, accompanied by 'network is unreachable' messages. What information should I collect to help you troubleshoot this issue?"

Some things I might try while waiting for a response are:

Is there a pattern to the 10% loss?

Does varying the packet size change the loss rate?

Do ierrs or oerrs show up in # netstat -iIf so, one per dropped packet, or more?

Does the BCM5720 work successfully under some other operating system? (Boot from a LiveCD or the Broadcom diagnostic to rule out defective hardware.)

If it is critical to get this system into production and you have an open slot, you might want to consider adding a network card with known driver support (I'm using both Intel em(4) and Broadcom bce(4)/bge(4) cards with success). If the BCM5720 you're having the issue with is on an add-in card, you might just try swapping the card. But I'm guessing it is built onto the R720 mainboard.

Sorry for late reply. I didn't forget this issue and I didn't give up either.
The experimental driver posted in above URL shows mixed results. It does not seem to work on Dell R720/R620 but I was told the driver works on Dell R420/R320(newer Dell model).
It seems there is some hardware differences on R720/R620 so it would be more helpful to know what is happening on these boxes. If one of R720/R620 owners can setup a remote debugging environments for me it would help a lot to find root cause.
See the following URL for possible remote debugging setup. If you have resources for remote debugging, please send private mail to yongari@FreeBSD.orghttp://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/remote_debugging.txt